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The human factor in licensing and operating the next generation of nuclear plants
As human factors specialists working at the intersection of human performance and nuclear operations, we are witnessing one of the nuclear sector’s most significant transitions in decades. The emergence of small modular reactors, microreactors, and other advanced designs is reshaping the industry’s landscape. Digital instrumentation and controls, passive safety systems, and increased automation are creating opportunities for greater safety margins and more flexible operation. These same features also fundamentally redefine what it means to “operate” a nuclear plant. Interactions among human roles, automation, and passive systems shape how people maintain awareness, exercise judgment, and intervene when necessary. These developments affect both operational realities and the regulatory foundations on which nuclear safety is built.
Ahmad Al Rashdan, Shawn St. Germain
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 8 | August 2019 | Pages 1062-1074
Rapid Communication – Special section on Big Data for Nuclear Power Plants | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1610637
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The operations and maintenance monitoring of nuclear power plants (NPPs) in the United States is reliant on manual activities supplying information to a human decision-making process. Several manually collected labor-intensive processes generate information that is not typically used beyond the intended target for collecting that information. The industry has recognized the benefits of both reducing labor-intensive tasks by automating them and increasing the fidelity of the information collected to enable advanced remote monitoring of NPPs using data-driven decision making. This requires developing new means to acquire data from the various data sources of an NPP. While some sources already exist in a digital form, others are collected manually, summarized through conclusive statements, or not collected at all. This paper describes 15 sources of data at an NPP and methods to migrate the data collection from a manual and analog data form to an automated and digital data form that increases the data fidelity in time and space. Three states of data collection methods are described for each data source. The states describe a base state for how the data are currently being collected, a modern state for a more efficient method of collecting data that has not yet been implemented, and a state of the art for an advanced method of collecting data that is not yet ready for deployment.